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Playstation 3 Code Signing Cracked For Good
ReportedlyWorking writes "It appears that Sony's PS3 has been fatally compromised. At the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a team named 'fail0verflow' revealed that they had calculated the Private Keys, which would let them or anyone else generate signed software for the PS3. Additionally, they also claim to have a method of jailbreaking the PS3 without the use of a Dongle, which is the current method. If all these statements are true, this opens the door to custom firmware, and homebrew software. Assuming that Sony doesn't take radical action and invalidate their private keys, this could mean that Jailbreaking is viable on all PS3, regardless of their firmware! From the article: 'Approximately a half hour in, the team revealed their new PS3 secrets, the moment we all were waiting for. One of the major highlights here was, dongle-less jailbreaking by overflowing the bootup NOR flash, giving complete control over the system. The other major feat, was calculating the public private keys (due to botched security), giving users the ability to sign their own SELFs. Following this, the team declared Sony's security to be EPIC FAIL!'"
"Following this, the team declared Sony's security to be EPIC FAIL!"
Is it really necessary for everybody to talk like complete dicks nowadays?
Epic Fail? WTF?
How many years has it taken to crack the PS3?
I'd say that Sony has done a remarkable job.
Does it go on forever?
It's a bit late to invalidate private keys.
My understanding is that every PS3 game is signed with those keys. Therefore, invalidating them through a firmware update would mean that every PS3 game to date will no longer work.
While I wouldn't put it past Sony to try this, this would result in not only massive lawsuits, but also would be a massive PR blunder.
Having said that, there could in theory be some sort of additional key telling what date a disc was signed, but even if that were true, it would be trivial to work around.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Thousands of commentards said this couldn't happen. How can people on the Internet be wrong?!
How did Sony fuck that one up?
It was my(admittedly layman's) understanding that a public/private key crypto implementation, assuming it isn't deeply flawed, using key lengths suited to the computational capacities of PDP-8s, or otherwise totally fucked, was mathematically secure against anything other than a profound breakthrough in prime factorization algorithms, an unbelievable advance in computational power, or an insider leaking your private key.
With stuffy like HDCP, it was understood that serious tradeoffs were made in order to make the crypto cheap and fast enough that any POS $200 monitor should be able to decode an encrypted bitstream fast enough to handle the demands of uncompressed digital monitor connections. The weaknesses just came with the territory.
With something like the PS3, though, they have serious computing power available, and were dealing with a straightforward case of "verify that the code signed with private key X has indeed been thus signed, and not modified since, using public key Y, from which private key X is essentially not computable". Virtually every real-world use of cryptography depends on the ability to do that without disclosing your private key(save by malicious insider/hacker attack).
What did Sony do wrong? Obviously, they could do nothing about a suitably well-equipped hacker physically modifying a PS3 to stop it from verifying at all, or to always return "yup, all good" regardless of the verification outcome; similarly, a firmware bug could allow the same outcome without the expense of physical modification; but how could it be that they would have to put anything in their client(no matter how well hidden by hardware obfuscation/TPMs/smarcards/whatever) that could be used to compute their private key? Isn't a public key, which is a totally safe piece of data to disclose, all you need to verify whether or not something has been signed with the matching private key?
I admit that I don't have a deep understanding of this stuff; but it seems like this is the equivalent of "Hey, possession of the list of trusted CAs and their public keys has allowed a hacker with a copy of firefox to compute Verisign's root signing keys!".
How did Sony fuck up such that this story is not the biggest breakthrough in cryptoanalysis since frequency analysis?
From @fail0verflow:
"we only started looking at the ps3 after otheros was killed."
and
"our goal is to have linux running on all existing PS3 consoles, whatever their firmware versions."
If Sony would have left OtherOS alone, they wouldn't be in this predicament.
Unless they can get every publisher to send the hashes for every version of every game they have sent to the CD press, some people will find their games broken
But Sony already possesses them - they had to sign them in the first place! Either that or they entrusted all those publishers with with their private signing key. Which would be a terrible idea.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The PS3 was being attacked well before OtherOS removal. When linux was available the graphics on the machine were limited to virtualization. The race was on too crack the 7 locked down SPUs. Were people successful? Mostly no, but that doesnt mean attempts havent been made. If i remember correctly, Geohot's intention was to gain access to the cores. They just happened to find an exploit to give them keys to the kingdom
Removing linux definitely brought the talent out of the woodwork, but it did not start a war
> Do they really have Sony's signing key?
Yes, we have most of their signing private keys.